Can the Creed Be Proven from Scripture?

Last year at the annual Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, a motion was put forward to add the Nicene Creed to its doctrinal statement.¹ The motion failed because it did not achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the vote and so the Creed was not added to the Southern Baptists’ statement of faith.²

I learned a lot from following these proceedings. The main thing I learned was that there are Christian denominations who do not accept the Nicene Creed yet still count as Christian. I had previously thought that confessing the Creed was the very definition of what made someone a Christian, and that denying the Creed meant that one was not a Christian! Yet nobody rejects the Southern Baptists’ claim to be a legitimately Christian denomination, whatever else they may think of them.

The reason the Southern Baptists rejected the Nicene Creed is not that they deny the divinity of Christ, the main reason the Creed was produced in the fourth century. Southern Baptists all believe that Christ is fully human and fully divine, and they would rapidly remove from ministry anyone who denied this. So why are they so nervous about confessing the Creed?

It turns out there are two reasons. The first has to do with the implications of the line “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” which suggests the sacramental efficacy of baptism, and the SBC denies any efficacy to baptism.³ But the second, more prominent reason was that adopting the Nicene Creed would imply that scripture was not sufficient to speak for itself on all essential matters of doctrine. The slogan “no creed but the Bible” gained prominence in social media during that time, as well as a quote attributed to a highly influential twentieth-century SBC leader, Adrian Rogers, who wrote “We have no need for a creed. We have the Bible . . . how can you improve on that?”

This sentiment is common among Evangelical Christians, many of whom do not know the Creed, even though they would usually be happy to affirm it if you recited it to them. They do not see the point in any Creed, since the Bible speaks for itself. The addition of any creed leads in a direction away from sola scriptura even though many more traditional Protestants insist that it does not violate the sola scriptura principle. But even among Catholics you often get the sense that the divinity of Christ, the original reason for producing the Creed, is so self-evident from Scripture that you hardly need the Creed to underscore it.

Yet some fear that if you insist that the Creed was necessary, then what you’re really saying is that the Bible is not clear about Christ’s divinity, or, worse, that the divinity of Christ cannot be deduced from scripture. Christians of all denominations would be very hesitant to say that. It seems, then, that the importance of scripture detracts from the importance of the Creed and vice versa: elevating one comes at the price of denigrating the other.

We will return to this problem later. At present it’s worth noting that paradoxically, the sense of the unnecessariness of the Creed is a consequence of its success, its ubiquity as an interpretative lens through which Scripture is read. For seventeen hundred years, Christians of all stripes have presupposed the Nicene Creed, taught it to their children, taught it in seminaries, and our deeply rooted hermeneutical instincts bear the mark of this tradition. The hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke about this as our wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, our historically-effected (not affected) consciousness.⁴ It is the consequence of reception history on our plausibility structures by which our minds are led to the most plausible interpretation of a text. The Southern Baptist Convention has had those plausibility structures so deeply embedded in the minds of all its members that it is no longer capable of imagining another way of reading the Bible, rendering the Council of Nicaea and the Creed it produced completely superfluous.

The reading tradition that presupposes the Creed has lost sight of the following fact: the Arianism that the Council condemned was, in its own view, every bit as faithful to scripture as the Nicene orthodoxy that condemned it. Moreover, the Arian tradition has never completely vanished from history, and there remain Arians today who proudly consider themselves to be sticking more closely to the scriptural witness than the Nicene tradition. And if you’re thinking, “How can you possibly be an Arian in light of the Bible verses that clearly express Christ’s divinity” then you are showing yourself to be so deeply embedded in the Nicene tradition that you’ve lost sight of the interpretative wars that led up to the Council of Nicaea. There are three verses you’re probably thinking of. Here is the first:

John 8:56-59

“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

We are used to being told that Jesus saying “I am” is a reference to the divine name as revealed in Exodus 3:14. In essence, Jesus was claiming that divine name for himself. But this is what the website “Biblical Unitarians” says:

The phrase “I am” occurs many other times in the New Testament and is used as an identifying phrase. For example, . . . at the Last Supper, the disciples were trying to find out who would deny the Christ. They said, literally, “Not I am, Lord” (Matt. 26:22, 25).⁵

In other words, simply because Jesus says “I am” it doesn’t necessarily mean he is referencing the divine name in the Old Testament.

The second Bible passage that often comes up is this one:

John 1:1–2

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν).

What about this phrase here: ‘θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος’ ? Is this not an incontrovertible proof of the divinity of Christ? Yet a very famous and influential book was published in 1963, called Honest to God. It was famous because it was written by an Anglican bishop, the first to deny the divinity of Christ and remain in office. This is what John A.T. Robinson writes about John 1:

The so-called Authorized Version has: “And the Word was God.” This would indeed suggest the view that “Jesus” and “God” were identical and interchangeable. But in Greek this would most naturally be represented by “God” with the article, not theos but ho theos. . . . The New English Bible, I believe, gets the sense pretty exactly with its rendering, “And what God was, the Word was.” In other words, if one looked at Jesus, one saw God — for “he who has seen me, has seen the Father.” . . . Through him, as through no one else, God spoke and God acted.⁶

I don’t mean you to find his argument convincing. That is not the point. The point is that it is possible, even if unlikely. It is a defensible interpretation of the text that cannot be ruled out absolutely.

Here is the third and final passage used to demonstrate Jesus’ divinity:

John 20:26-28

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

Andrew Perriman, a New Testament scholar who lives in London, wrote this:

The wording of the confession reflects the “custom,” recorded in Suetonius and Dio Cassius, of addressing the emperor Domitian (AD 81–96) as “our master and our god.” … It may be better to regard Thomas’ confession as a rhetorical statement, an affirmation of political-religious loyalty on the part of the Johannine community, than as anything like an ontological or direct identification of Jesus as “God.” To do obeisance to the risen Jesus was somewhat like doing obeisance to Domitian as “master” and “god.” It begins as a response to the human person, not as a revelation of divine nature.⁷

A little desperate? Perhaps. But is it any more desperate than pro-Nicene attempts to interpret the following verses?

Acts 2:36

“God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

Hebrews 3:1–2

“Consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed [ποιήσαντι] him.”

The normal translation hides what Arius liked about this verse. The word “appointed” is more literally translated “made.” This strongly suggests that Jesus was “faithful to the one who made him.”

Romans 8:19

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Colossians 1:15

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Both the above passages speak of Jesus as “firstborn” in relation to creation, clearly implying, for a particular interpretive lens, that Jesus is the first among all the created beings, but not the creator.

John 14:28

“The Father is greater than I.”

I don’t need to give you the pro-Nicene interpretation of these verses. Everyone with any kind of Catholic education has them deeply embedded in their consciousness. But considered at a distance, are they really the most plausible interpretations? Are they more plausible than the Arian interpretations of the above three verses that point to Jesus’ divinity?

There’s no way to answer that question objectively or neutrally. Plausibility, likelihood, in considering alternative interpretations, is a subjective feeling given by your whole being, your whole worldview, your intellectual formation from your birth until now.

Now for Catholics that doesn’t matter. We trust the tradition, we trust that the Holy Spirit guided the Council to the right interpretation of scripture, and we base our faith not on the Bible but on the witness of the Church. All I wish to point out is that affirming the Nicene Creed is an affirmation based not on reason alone, but also on faith. We have faith that the Nicene Creed is the correct interpretation of scripture. To have faith in something implies that it does not need to be proven in order to be true. As Aquinas says, “sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith (for thereby the merit of faith would come to an end), but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine.”⁸ Rational proof is not the basis of faith. There may be good reasons to believe the Creed — and these reasons may even be superior to the reasons not to believe it — but this does not entail proof in the sense of apodictic and irrefutable argument.

If this is the case, then let’s return to the Southern Baptists. Their rejection of the Creed, not because they disagree with it, but because they insist that the Bible speaks for itself, means that, logically speaking, they should embrace as fellow Christians anyone who interprets the Bible in an Arian manner, anyone who denies the divinity of Christ yet claims to be faithful to Scripture. They may disagree with the way scripture is being interpreted by Arians, but they can’t deny that it is an interpretation. And as an interpretation of scripture, it should in principle be welcome among proponents of sola scriptura.

Yet I know no Protestant who would be happy with this kind of arrangement. Protestantism depends on the idea that the Creed can be proven from scripture and for that very reason is not needed in order to affirm its contents. All Protestant denominations and non-denominational churches continue to insist on the divinity of Christ as clearly taught in scripture, such that anyone who denies it must be denying scripture. Yet as we have seen, if this were so, then no Council of Nicaea or Nicene Creed would ever have existed. They came about precisely because the argument between Arians and their opponents was not resolvable solely from scripture. Its very existence is itself proof that its affirmations cannot be proven from scripture alone.

Why am I pointing this out? Because it points to the need to trust the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Council, a guidance that in turn guides all Christians into the true interpretation of scripture. Because there is no objective viewpoint on scripture, no interpretation free of tradition and prejudice, as Gadamer teaches us, we have no choice but to accept or reject the Nicene tradition for reasons other than scripture itself. And if we choose to accept the Nicene tradition, we are implicitly accepting more than just the plain scripture.

These points may seem blindingly obvious to Catholics, but they are not to Protestants. The point is that Catholic and Protestant agreement on the content of the Creed can mask deeper-level disagreements about reasons for believing the Creed. It may be a fruitful avenue for ecumenical dialogue to discuss these reasons. Doing so would serve to highlight, not only the ongoing necessity of the Creed, but also the “conditions for the possibility” (Kantian style) of affirming the Creed. To trust the Creed as a faithful interpretation of scripture is to add an ecclesiological dimension at the very root of Christian dogma, a dimension that Protestants rarely notice. Yet drawing their attention to it requires a certain courage to face the fact that the Creed cannot be proven from scripture, which means facing the plausibility of Arianism as an alternative interpretation of scripture. It means teaching students and parishioners alike that Arianism makes coherent sense and is not a blatantly false way of reading the New Testament, and most Catholics don’t want to do that. But I think more can be gained from doing that. It highlights the need for the creed, and if we need the creed, then we also need the Church that produced it to help us interpret scripture well.